Tag Archives: society

When the street lights came on

How many of us Gen X kids stayed out until the street lights came on? That was the signal to head hone for bed. Until the street lights came on, all your parents knew about your location was that you were somewhere in the neighbourhood…. somewhere.

Kids today, their parents always know where they are. This isn’t that new. Even us X’ers didn’t let our kids have this freedom. We grew up in an era when news reports started telling us what a bad world we live in. Unsafe. Dangerous for kids.

Now we are locked down in a way that really limits kids freedoms even more. Where are you going? Who are you seeing? Are they all in your small bubble of friends? Coronavirus has locked us all down and limited where we go and who we see.

This is really tough for kids. They don’t have any equivalent experience of being out until the street lights turn on. They don’t have a place to be unsupervised by adults… not to raise hell and cause trouble, just to be kids.

How much of their time is organized. Even fun is organized… soccer practice, dance classes, music lessons, are all put in the calendar. Play is scheduled, like recess and lunch at school, every free moment isn’t really free at all.

I think we need to find ways to give kids some of the freedom we had as kids, when we could stay out, unsupervised, until the street lights came on.

Resilience Revisited

Right now it seems like I chose the right #OneWord for 2020: Resilience. But as you read my last post of 2019, written before we learned about the impending pandemic, remember something… We are social beings and we are not incredibly resilient on our own. We need a community, we need friendship and love, we need each other.

Relationships, be they with family, friends, co-workers, student/teacher, and even pets, build our resilience, and our ability to not just cope, but to thrive.

Let’s support one another and show our resilience together!

Here is the post:

December 31, 2019

If I were to pick 2 words for 2020, I might pick “Growth Mindset”, but if I’m only choosing a single word, it would be:

Resilience

The world needs this word right now. Here are some specific places I see a need to pay attention to this #OneWord in 2020.

In Schools:

Student anxiety seems to be on the rise, and anxiety lowers resilience and the willingness to try new things. Words seem to ‘injure’ students in ways that victimize them rather than make them stronger. This is not to say that students should tolerate bullying or inappropriate language or slander, rather they should speak up, defend themselves, and report poor behaviour. Instead it seems that they feel wounded and do not act. This is a sensitive topic, but one where I’ve seen a greater awareness of adults who want to support students and at the same time I see students allowing words to hurt them deeply, giving too much power to the transgressor.

In Politics:

I said this in Ideas on a Spectrum, “In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary.“ – We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, “…we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.” When we can’t have conversations with people that have different political views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

In Online Spaces:

People will make mistakes online. They will say things that are unintentionally hurtful, or blindly offensive. This is different than someone being intentionally biased and rude. If the slander is intentional, it should be reported. If it is unintentional, even to the point of ignorance, we need to be more resilient about what our responses are. When every transgression is treated with an attack, the most severe/bigoted/rude/biased transgressions are not given the heightened alarm that they deserve. With lesser errors and mistakes, we need to let people have a venue to recognize their errors and invite conversation rather than damnation.

Growing up, I heard the playground retort to taunts, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me.” We are past the era of letting nasty people say whatever nasty things they want, and just turning the other cheek to pretend we are not hurt. This is a good thing. We want to live in a world where that behaviour is not acceptable. But it does not serve us well to treat the attacker like they can not repent or be sorry. It does not serve us to let the words said hurt us too deeply. By being resilient we can speak up, clarify our perspective, and engage in conversations that help us feel empowered rather than victimized.

Resilience allows us to be strong, flexible, and engaged in a society that is the kind of society we want to live and thrive in.

Digital bubble

Just a quick reminder that while our social circles are very small right now, we can still connect with others online. Make that phone call a video call. Make that video call a 3-way or 4-way conversation.

We need to be thoughtful about how many people we meet face to face with, but that doesn’t limit us from connecting with family and friends online.

Who haven’t you seen in a while that you miss? Well, you can still see them on a screen. You don’t have to tidy the house or add an extra cleaning to the bathroom, just pick up your laptop or phone and make a call. (Ok, maybe comb your hair first 😜.)

We live in an incredibly connected world and we can make distance and time zones disappear with the click of a few buttons. So, who are you missing right now? It’s time to open up your digital bubble!

Know your audience

Social media is filled with people who are ‘preaching to the converted’. There is nowhere that this is more evident than in politics and religion. I’m amazed at the blindness with which people spew their ideology.

Basically, what I (mostly) see are two ignorant camps:

1. I don’t care what you think.

2. You don’t think like me, so you are an idiot.

Neither of these deliver a message that comes remotely close to convincing anyone of anything. Neither of these pander to an audience beyond those that already agree with the perspective being shared. Neither of these promote thought or dialogue.

Sure it might feel good. Yes, it’s nice to be in the company of others that completely agree with you. But social media shouldn’t just be about screaming into an echo chamber, and there should be opportunities for dialogue that goes beyond winning a point against a foe whom doesn’t even acknowledge your point.

I keep coming back to the realization that ideas lie on a spectrum, and the reason I keep coming back to this is because most of us don’t sit on the extremes, even if that’s where we argue our points from. We don’t really wish ill of those that oppose our view, we don’t really believe that our neighbours are unneighbourly because they view things differently than us, politically, religiously, or ideologically. Yet that’s what it looks like on social media.

Are you trying to share your view only with people that already agree with you? Or are you trying to share your view with others who think differently? If your answer is the latter, then think about your audience, and share a message they can actually hear.

Voting in a democracy

How many people have died, fighting either to earn the opportunity to vote, or to keep the freedom to participate in a free and open society? Yet many individuals in free and democratic societies don’t make the effort to exercise their right… their duty, to vote. It amazes me. It baffles me.

Even if you don’t think your vote will make a difference. Even if you feel you have to choose the lesser evil because you are not a fan of any candidate or party. Even if you aren’t passionate about any of the party platforms… you have the opportunity to contribute to a process that makes your life better than if you didn’t have that opportunity at all.

Voting in a democracy should be like renewing your driver’s licence… something you have to do every few years. If you don’t vote, you should have to pay a penalty when you pay taxes. But more than that, it should be something you want to do; to participate in a free and open society. It should be a duty you want to perform.

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Upcoming elections: With Covid-19, there are more options to vote than just in person on Election Day. Your options can including voting early, and/or by mail, but this requires action before Election Day… so register now!

BC, Canada Provincial Election – October 24th 2020: Online Voter Registration

US Federal Election – November 3rd, 2020: I Will Vote

Anti-social media

I was in a Twitter conversation recently that went a bit sideways. I don’t want to get into details, but I want to talk about a landscape of social sharing that is exhausting me. Is it just me or does every challenging conversation seem to go somewhere it doesn’t have to?

Pick any prominent public figure, if they say anything germane to a serious topic, the comment responses are caustic and angry. It’s like people are trolling just to attack. That’s not what happened in the conversation I was having, but that’s where my mind went.

What happened to me was that I went silent. I had more to share, but saw no use in saying more. The conversation between two others went to a place where I could add no value. It was upsetting. I am not someone who likes to walk away from something unresolved, but I didn’t have the words. I typed a response, then deleted it. I did this again.

I can’t stay on Twitter and only share things I think will acquire likes and positive comments. I’m not a poop disturber either, but I want to be able to go to hard places sometimes, to question and to learn. But I’m not feeling like good discourse can happen on social media anymore. Discourse has become argument and different views are not tolerated.

What I’m talking about goes far beyond the conversation I had, but what I’ve seen recently has pushed me away from following conversation threads on Twitter… Not because I’m not interested in the topic, but because I’m not interested in the polar, angry, and even nasty comments that fill any (even slightly) controversial thread.

Social media seems a lot less social these days.

The energy of the sun

I’m sitting in the morning sun, feeling the rays warm my shoulders and back. I love this feeling. It’s not so hot that I feel I need suntan location, and yet it’s warm enough to bring the heat to my attention.

While energy can’t be created or destroyed, we know it can be transformed from one form to another. The rays of the sun initiate the process of photosynthesis, which creates sugars and gives us the mass of trees. What an amazing thing! But going further, when we say that energy can’t be destroyed, it certainly can be tapped and taken advantage of. There is an incredible abundance of energy in our world. While in a closed system the amount of energy stays constant, we do not live in a closed system.

We live about 150 million kilometres away from our sun, a blazing ball of energy that constantly sends a massive amount of energy our way. It actually sends that energy out in every direction and we get in the way of a infinitesimally small amount of it as the earth sits within gravitational equilibrium of this glowing fireball of power.

It is the earth’s battery, and it is the ultimate provider of light, energy, and life. We’ve only just begun to understand how to tap this power, and one day we will learn to store it in such a way that energy will be almost completely free. How different will our world be then?

On a small yet very significant scale, the poor will have light without kerosene, and formerly forested areas in places that now have scarcely enough wood could be allowed to grow again, without the needy scrounging for firewood. On a large scale, industry could pollute far less with the lack of need of fossil fuels to run machinery.

Imagine a world where energy is literally created out of thin air? Tapped from the power of our sun, and shared wherever needed. It would be a very different world!

It’s seeping in

Last night I had a dream and while I don’t remember all of it, I do remember that social distancing played a part in what was happening. Having to keep my distance from others was hindering the task I was trying to do. This is the first time that I can recall the pandemic seeping into my dreams.

I wonder how this is affecting our psyche? What impact is it having on people who already felt isolated? How is it adding stress to our family dynamics and our jobs?

I don’t know why, but a short (pretty insignificant) scene that I witnessed weeks ago keeps replaying in my mind as sort of a ‘statement of impact’ of the pandemic. I was in my car at the closest traffic light intersection to my home, and I was the first car stopped at the light. On the far left curb a dad and his young daughter on bicycles rode up on the sidewalk to the intersection. The 3 or 4 year old girl got off her bike to press the crosswalk button. She put her bike down, went to the button and raised her elbow to press it.

That’s the whole scene which keeps replaying in my mind. That simple motion of a little kid pressing a button with her elbow rather than her finger. It somehow defines the pandemic response for me. Things have changed. We will do things differently in response to Covid-19 for years to come. Young kids won’t know how this has impacted them because they will just grow up doing things that are culturally ‘normal’, even if the behaviours were not normal just 6 months ago.

I lived in China for a couple years just after H1N1. It wasn’t pervasive, but some people would wear masks in public. It became something that was just part of the public landscape. We will see that here, for a long time coming.

Automatic doors are going to be everywhere. Voice operated elevators will ask us what floor we are going to. Hand sanitizer will greet us in shop and restaurant entrances. Lineups will be spaced out, and social distancing social etiquette will be ingrained into our behaviour.

For many of us this is an adjustment. But for young kids, dreams involving social distancing will always have been there, and pressing buttons with elbows is just what has always been done. For us we see these things seeping into our dreams and habits. For young kids it is already the norm.

It’s a little surreal

If you looked ahead at where you would be for 2020, any time in 2019, you were probably wrong. The word pandemic meant nothing to you outside of a dystopian science fiction movie. Yet here we are and I have to say that I slip into these bizarrely off-centre moments that seem quite surreal.

I’m walking on a sidewalk and decide to step onto the road to let someone coming towards me pass. I’m lined up to get into a grocery store as if I’m waiting to see a bank teller. I’m nodding to greet someone I’m meeting for the first time, avoiding a handshake. I’m leaving the room because I feel the urge to sneeze. I’m putting candles on my sister’s cake and wondering if this will be something we do in the future? I pass a children’s indoor playground facility and wonder if it will ever open up again? I push elevator and crosswalk buttons with my elbow, and wonder how long it will be before all public places have verbally operated buttons, and automatic doors?

These are small moments but they remind me of how much things have (and will change since covid-19 has snuck into the fabric of our society around the world… and sometimes it just feels surreal.

We do not know

In a number of different places I’ve already said that COVID-19 has humbled me in that my thoughts and predictions have been way off. I’m not the only one.

Here is an interesting but worrisome article from Vox: My patient caught Covid-19 twice. So long to herd immunity hopes?

“We do not know how much immunity to expect once someone is infected with the virus, we do not know how long that immunity may last, and we do not know how many antibodies are needed to mount an effective response.”

There is still so much we need to learn about this virus that has changed the social and economic habits of humankind on a massive scale. So much we don’t know.

Here’s one thing I believe, (while admittedly not truly knowing):

We are going to be dealing with COVID-19 social restrictions and economic repercussions well into 2022.

I want to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I doubt that I’m wrong.

I tend to be optimistic, and this doesn’t sound very optimistic. Not at all. But I think accepting that from now and right through 2021, we will be navigating a defensive response to COVID-19 will help us stay positive. We can plan the best possible path forward facing a very challenging scenario, and be pleasantly surprised if I’m wrong. This is better than hoping for the best and continually being disappointed.

If we prepare for a long response, adhering to the required social distancing and social norms recommended to us, we will make things better, faster.

The path forward won’t be easy, but maybe we’ll learn some valuable lessons along the way. On the path, we need to be patient with each other. Tolerant. Forgiving. Kind.

We aren’t designed to live our lives in a constant state of anxiety or stress, and it’s hard to constantly adapt to change. But the rules for social interaction are going to be fluid for a while, sometimes loosening restrictions and opening public and social spaces, sometimes closing them down again. We need to be fluid too. Responsive. Adaptable.

We may not know what the future holds, but we will be more prepared for that future if we prepare for a prolonged and bumpy ride. Let’s work together and make it as smooth as possible.